[B1] Going cold turkey on opiates while pregnant can result in a miscarriage. Taking opiates – even in a maintenance program – isn’t allowed and will trigger CPS interest. NBC has a good piece on the conflict that occurs when following doctors’ orders is illegal.

[B2] Aaron Carroll writes with nihilism – and truth – on just how bleak the picture is for people trying to achieve permanent weight loss.

[B3] More nihilism: Short of shrinking the stomach, almost nothing works on a scale. (Note: If 95% of people can’t do something, it cannot really be said to work.

[B7] A 91-year old woman in San Diego ran a 26.2 mile marathon. Which is amazing. She broke a record for her age bracket of 90-and-over, which is even more amazing. Not that she broke the record (good for her on that, of course) but that there is an age bracket with a record.

[M2] Olga points to an office for introverts. With the cubicle having become so standardized, will future generations look at the desire for anything else (other than shared workspaces, of course) as anti-social and Not The Way Things Should Be? For my own part, the open nature of cubes was probably good for the introvert in me, to get me to push my boundaries.

[A1] Noah Smith says that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the world’s best leader. Not bad for a guy who was office barely a year the last time around.

[A2] You know Japan is worried about their age-demographic spread when they’re actually debating immigration. China has a one-child crisis, though it may not be related to the actual policy since other states without the One-Child policy face similar problems. To be fair, though, a number of them have had anti-fertility policies over the years, even if not as dramatic as One-Child.

[C4] Will Self doesn’t begrudge the smoking bans, but finds himself missing the smoke. There is a solution to that, of course, that is quickly being banned, of course.

[C5] Though we didn’t have one, I tend to think that lavish weddings often get a bad rap. But I have a hard time wrapping my head around the average Manhattan wedding costing $90,000. And, $3,000 wedding cakes?

A lot of the delinquency of yesteryear could have migrated online with today’s generation. It just could be that kids are expressing their anti-social tendencies online rather than in real life delinquency. As we discussed in Saul’s thread about that woman in South Carolina, modern kids are also under closer supervision than kids in the past. That kind of dampers the ability to be a delinquent. Zero-tolerance policies in schools don’t help either. This might also be evidence of Kevin Drum’s lead thesis.

As a person that wasn’t particularly wild as a kid, teenager, or adult, I’m thrilled. The idealization of childhood and teenage delinquency always annoyed me because it suggested I was failing short in several ways because of my natural inclinations.Report

Re: C2 [teenagers and sex]: the author very closely describes something that could be my own experience. And by the time I was in my late 20s and early 30s, it–or at least the way I handled and reacted to it–had become a very big problem. In other words, I agree with his argument.

Re: Hi2 [MacArthur]: I know there’s a popular culture idea that the general was vain and, for example, insisted on liberating (Leyte?) when doing so wasn’t militarily feasible. But that–and his WWII generalship and even his Inchon Landing–isn’t my objection to him, and while I’m no expert in military matters, I usually don’t encounter people who question his ability as a commander to manage military operations. The main objections I have and most others seem to have is to what the author here concedes: the general’s insubordination to President Truman.

Hi1 [rethinking time]: I just wouldn’t have guessed Tyler’s grandchildren would still be alive.Report

C2-Same here. The problem I have with the people that teen sex is that it assumes that every teenager could have this experience if they wanted to. Not everybody has either the inclination or the opportunity to engage in teen sexcapades or even twenty-something sexcapades for a variety of reasons. It would be nice to get some acknwoledgment that not everybody has the same opportunities or inclinations and we aren’t freaks.Report

That was a really difficult period in my life. I can’t lay my bad reaction to it entirely to the way people talk about teen (and later) sex. I made choices I’m not proud of and chose to believe and say things that in retrospect I realize were wrong.

But there certainly could have been ways in which society or education or whatever could have made things easier or less difficult. What gets me is that the ones who are supposed to be on the side of safe, informed choices seem to be the ones who adopt this rhetoric, the damaging nature of which the author in C2 outlines so well.

By the way, I don’t know if you’re still in the situation I was in, but if so, all I can say is I’ve been there and I empathize.Report

I almost posted something similar on that post (I work from home: I’ve taken whole meetings in the “office”), but in Burt’s story they were (I think primarily) blue-collar/factory workers, not information.

You can’t build a faucet on the throne – there’s no app for that.Report

McArthur was a military genius, and his direction of the occupation of Japan after WWII was a resoiunding success. The popular perception of him as a vain poseur is as accurate as that of J Edgar Hoover as a transvestite (which seems to be universal these days, even though it’s based on one unreliable informant.) It’s true that his attack on the Bonus Marchers was ghastly. For some reason that didn’t affect the reputation of his second-in-command, a guy named Eisenhower.Report

My grandfather fought in the Pacific and he never talked about it (though he hinted at some things after he hit his 70’s… thinking about the other guys in his platoon every day, that sort of thing). He had a handful of rants that he didn’t mind giving, though, one involved how he was a democrat proud to have voted against Eisenhower because of the treatment of MacArthur.Report

For some reason that didn’t affect the reputation of his second-in-command, a guy named Eisenhower.

Or Patton, who had a more active role than Eisenhower. Though Eisenhower wasn’t second in command; MacArthur was the Army’s chief of staff, a full general (4 stars, though temporary, while he served as Chief of Staff; his permanent rank at the time was still Major General, 2 stars), and Eisenhower a lowly major.

You’re also right that MacArthur’s reputation is undeserved, though his behavior in Korea almost makes it deserved. The insistence on a costly and bloody full invasion of the Philippines when it would have made more military sense to either bypass the islands or invade only the more strategically valuable ones, doesn’t help. But he definitely kicked ass once he got out of the surf with his pipe. And on the Marne and in the Argonne.Report

I can’t forgive MacArthur his insubordination in the Korea conflict. Not that we didn’t go down the path toward something like a militaristic state anyway, but his actions were emblematic of that bad thing.Report

Ho2-The San Francisco housing crisis is a problem of interesting proportions. Not all of the NIMBYism that led to the current housing crisis is necessarily bad. Opposing free way construction did a lot to keep San Francisco aesthetically beautiful, and lets face it freeways would have destroyed a lot of its prettiness, and probably did quite a bit to prevent San Franisco to suffer the fate of other old cities in the United States. San Franisco was hit less hard by suburbinzation than many other major American cities and remained viable.

Part of what makes San Franisco a great place to live is how it looks and the fact that its a vibrant place. The issue facing San Francisco is how can it increase its housing stock without totally changing the aesthetics of the place. My suggestion is that there should be a lot more growth in the parts of San Francisco where tourists don’t normally tred, especially around the western and southern neighborhoods of the city and more investment in transit so people living in those neighborhoods have more access to the central parts of San Francisco.

The other problem is that the other municipalities in the area aren’t doing their bit to absorb more people and expecting San Francisco to do all the work. Oakland and San Jose in particular could absorb more people because they are already big cities rather than single-family home suburbs so building apartments won’t effect the tone of the place.Report

I just read this morning that median home prices rose above the 1,000,000 Mark last month in the City and County. I’ve a friend who lives in Sunset, a few blocks away from SFSU and Lake Merced, and that’s where some of the “affordable” if often unbeautiful homes are. But when “affordable” is below a seven figure median price, either the housing solutions need to expand beyond the confines of the City and County (necessarily implication transit arteries given the peculiar geography) or we need to dramatically lens who it is that’s affording what.Report

One of the big problems in San Francisco, its a problem in many other desirable cities but San Francisco has an especially bad case, is that NIMBYism is preventing new housing development because of greed as the link says. Our political system gives a lot of powers to the NIMBYs. New York City has NIMBYs to but they seem political impotent compared to the ones in San Francisco and its suburbs. Right across the street from me in my Brooklyn neighborhood, a really massive apartment compelx is being built. I can find several other new apartments in my neighborhood, Brooklyn, and the other boroughs easier.

Liberals are pretty bad when it comes to housing policy. Too many refuse to allow new building to take place because of their vested interest. Either they are home owners that do not want to lose the value of their investment or they have rent control if they live in a city with rent control. Whats worse is that the opponents of building houses warp their self-interest with arguments about historical preservation, environmentalism, and social justice. At least Right NIMBYs are more honest that they are acting out of greed. You can deal with greedy people. People who confuse their self-interest with social justice, not so much.Report

Who decides densities? The developer? At best he passes through the cost of the increased demand for services? The State? The County? The City? The neighborhood?

Actually, in California, all of those entities have a voice. The Legislature demands that local agencies adopt General Plans and Specific Plans. The minimum requirements of those plans, including affordable housing elements are set by state law. But the actual content of the plans is largely set by the local government — counties for unincorporated areas and cities within their municipal boundaries. Conflicts between county plans and city plans, and the adequacy of plans can and frequently are litigated. And, because SF is on the water, the California Coastal Commission also gets involved in land use decisions.

One of the things that really chaps my hide is people like Yglesias asserting that he knows best how people in SF and Silicon Valley ought to live. Increased density everywhere! That will solve the traffic problem!

No. As the Los Angeles experience teaches, people tend to live not much more than 45 minutes commute from their place of employment, and 30 is better. Adding bus lines, subway lines, freeways, wider roads etc. will change residential demand around the hub of employment, but at the end of the day the traffic will rise to those levels.

If the fine residents and elected officials of the City and County of SF don’t want to live in Manhattan, that’s their choice. And if it becomes impossible to hire a barista at a minimum wage, then give her a raise or persuade elected officials to expand the affordable housing element. But as a resident of a beach community myself, I have no desire for East Coast busybodies telling me that I’m to blame for failing to vote to raise the maximum height limit.

And, by the way, SF is maxed out on its water supply. But I’m sure that new water can be found somewhere (in this drought-ridden state) to find a reliable long-term supply. Surely some rice farmers somewhere can be ‘persuaded’ to sell.Report

At least some degree of local control over such matters seems reasonable to me. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are immune from criticism for pursuing the policies that they do. Nor am I particularly obliged to feel a whole lot of sympathy when the pursued policies blow up in their collective faces.

(As mentioned in my other comment, I am becoming convinced that San Francisco proper has done its part. I’ll stop singling them out. They’re suffering a lot of the consequences caused by surrounding areas, which is unfortunate. Of course, that’s one of the problems with NIMBYism and “local control”… you’re often pushing the problem elsewhere. Which is part of why I think such matters should be subject to some scrutiny and criticism where warranted.)Report

Sure we can agree on local control. The bigger issue for me is people who simultaneously want to limit housing and keep it affordable. The basic laws of supply and demand can’t be suspended just because we don’t like their effects. All we can ever do is get other people to pay the price one way or another so that we can hide the effects from ourselves to keep up the illusion that they’re not real.Report

James, Only way housing in SF can stay affordable is by having such good public transportation (and cheap food). Hereabouts most people spend so much on their cars (which depreciate) — food’s actually more expensive here too (supply chains are pretty long, i suppose — give the blackhearts that. 😉 ).Report

Will, re: counties and cities. I just couldn’t disagree with you more vigorously. About a decade ago I got caught up on the research on city-county consolidation. My takeaway was that in a lot of cases it was a really bad idea because there was just too much variation in interests between city and county.

Toledo, OH, for example, was talking about it for a while, mostly because they were losing businesses to the suburbs, and decided if they couldn’t lock the businesses inside their boundaries, they’d just redraw the boundaries back out around them. But Toledo covers only a small part of the county, and aside from a handful of suburbs, the bulk of the county is rural and classic small farm towns, folks who want nothing to do with Toledo governance, and a lot of whom actually drive across the state line to Indiana to do their shopping.

Indianapolis/Marion County is often held out as a success, and it made more sense than Toledo because the city covered the bulk of the county, with the unincorporated areas forming a comparatively thin ring around the city. But the benefits have been very one-sided because of that, flowing primarily to the city, and in fact primarily to the upper middle class part of the city. It’s not by any means a disaster, not even really a failure, but it’s not what people make it out to be.

(Curiously, it’s not just large cities that cover most of their counties where it’s successful, but also fairly small cities in very rural counties, like Deer Lodge, Montana. My take is that in each case the interests of the city and the interests of the rest of the county are not so disparate.)

Of course you didn’t speak specifially to consolidation, but to eliminating cities in favor of county gov’t. But I think that’s a bad idea, too. As the case of Toledo (and Detroit, and many other places) shows, Tiebout sorting is a real thing. People often take competition between municipalities as a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily so. It’s a type of market and can hold municipalities accountable (Exit, when voice doesn’t work).Report

Will, it depends on the situation. If there aren’t any well-defined communities than I agree that counties are the only local government you need. Well defined and densely populated, by American standards, should be incorporated. Maybe we could do what Virginia does and make cities independent.

What I do think we should do is consolidate the elected organs of local government but increase the numbers in those bodies.Report

@james-hanley It doesn’t surprise me at all that the benefits tend to flow in the direction of the city at the expense of the surrounding areas. The status quo favors the surrounding areas significantly and nixing cities is a negation of that unfair advantage. I am hardly the most yay-cities-boo-suburbs guy around here*, but it allows suburbs to absorb upper middle class and wealthy residents who get to avoid city taxes (excluding sales taxes where applicable) while taking advantage of city amenities and the conglomeration of people that the principle cities stand as the flagpole for.

My prescription is, I admit, overly broad. There are counties in Montana the size of entire states and that would be a problem (Deer Lodge and Silver Bow being exceptions). But I believe it would be beneficial for at least over half of the cities and counties I’ve lived in. The advantage of some at the expense of others, of course, but advantageous more plus than minus in my view.

* – I do find urbanists and liberals to be more predisposed to this idea than conservatives, though it’s important to remember this: bringing in the suburbs means bringing in suburban voters. The segregation of voters is an issue related to this.Report

On counties v. cities: One of the most obscure areas of California public law is the LAFCO, the Local Agency Formation Commission. LAFCOs exist pursuant to state law, one for each county, and are made up of elected officials from the county, the cities in the county and the limited purpose agencies (water districts) within the county.

LAFCOs draw lines. So if a city wants to expand into currently unincorporated county land, the city goes to the LAFCO and gets its boundary adjusted.

LAFCO work is weird. On the one hand it’s highly technical and utterly obscure. And on the other hand its a critical planning tool by which people shift from county life — less regulated, but fewer services — to city life.Report

The other problem is that the other municipalities in the area aren’t doing their bit to absorb more people and expecting San Francisco to do all the work.

Thanks for mentioning this, because that’s one of the things I have become very convinced of over the last few weeks: that San Francisco isn’t really problem. Well, maybe they’re a part of it, but it’s really hard for me to be critical of SF itself when the surrounding areas are going further out of their way to provide considerably less density. I’m starting to think that a lot of my past criticisms have been misdirected.Report

Lots of the people moving to San Francisco are single people. What they need are apartments of various size, depending on whether they want or need roomates, rather than single-family homes. Many of the suburban cities are admitently refusing to allowing for the construction of apartment buildings from what I understand.Report

[Hi1]: A few years ago, the unmarked grave of a Union solder was discovered along the road that the Union forces took to Nashville after the battle. Anyway, why it relates to Hi1 is that two children of Civil War veterans (with a third scheduled, but ultimately unable to attend) attended the reinterment ceremony. That’s two children of Civil War veterans, not great great grandchildren, not great grandchildren, not even grandchildren, but two children of Civil War veterans.Report

Hi2: I’m no military historian so I can’t comment on his WWII record, and by all the accounts I’ve heard MacArthur did a good job in post-war Japan, but that’s kind of outweighed by the fact that in the Korean War he tried to take actions (invading China) that would start a global thermonuclear war, and was only prevented by being fired. There’s worse generals in terms of battlefield competence (McClellan!), but it’s hard to top “nearly destroyed the world through aggressive arrogance”.Report

Since the pensions went to children of veterans, or wives, with no restrictions on when the children were born or the marriage made, some of it spans really unusual lengths of time. The last Civil War widow drawing a pension died in 2003 at age 93, but IIRC, he was 70-something and she was 16 when they got married.

History happens. My mother remembers when electricity came to the small Iowa town where she lived as a girl. My grandmother told me about the kids chasing the first car that came through town.

Inside every old person is a young person asking, “What the hell happened?”Report

From August 2018 through February 2019, AVENATTI defrauded a client (“Victim-1”) by diverting money owed to Victim-1 to AVENATTI’s control and use. After assisting Victim-1 in securing a book contract, AVENATTI allegedly stole a significant portion of Victim-1’s advance on that contract. He did so by, among other things, sending a fraudulent and unauthorized letter purporting to contain Victim-1’s signature to Victim-1’s literary agent, which instructed the agent to send payments not to Victim-1 but to a bank account controlled by AVENATTI. As alleged, Victim-1 had not signed or authorized the letter, and did not even know of its existence.

Specifically, prior to Victim-1’s literary agent wiring the second of four installment payments due to Victim-1 as part of the book advance, AVENATTI sent a letter to Victim-1’s literary agent purportedly signed by Victim-1 that instructed the literary agent to send all future payments to a client trust account in Victim-1’s name and controlled by AVENATTI. The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance. When Victim-1 began inquiring of AVENATTI as to why Victim-1 had not received the second installment, AVENATTI lied to Victim-1, telling Victim-1 that he was still attempting to obtain the payment from Victim-1’s publisher. Approximately one month after diverting the payment, AVENATTI used funds recently received from another source to pay $148,750 to Victim-1, so that Victim-1 would not realize that AVENATTI had previously taken and used Victim-1’s money.

Approximately one week later, pursuant to AVENATTI’s earlier fraudulent instructions, the literary agent sent another payment of $148,750 of Victim-1’s book advance to the client account controlled by AVENATTI. AVENATTI promptly began spending the money for his own purposes, including to make payments to individuals with whom AVENATTI had a personal relationship, to make a monthly lease payment on a luxury automobile, and to pay for airfare, dry cleaning, hotels, restaurants and meals, payroll, and insurance costs. Moreover, to conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to AVENATTI, as Victim-1’s lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that Victim-1 believed was missing, AVENATTI led Victim-1 to believe that Victim-1’s publisher was refusing to make the payment to the literary agent, when, as AVENATTI knew, the publisher had made the payment to the literary agent, who had then sent the money to AVENATTI pursuant to AVENATTI’s fraudulent instructions.

Here are my principal conclusions:1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Rep. Justin Amash, a critic of President Trump who entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread after reviewing the full special counsel report.

Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Robert S. Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it. “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The president often says the report found “no collusion, no obstruction,” though neither is true. Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which did interfere in the 2016 election. He did not rule on the obstruction of justice question, saying it was something Congress should determine.

Amash, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, declined on Sunday to rule out a possible 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate.

"Well, I would never rule anything out. That's not on my radar right now," he said of a 2020 bid to Tapper. "But I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting."

Amash told Tapper he believes there is a "wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides" and that "Congress is totally broken."

"I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people -- because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans -- and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time," Amash said.

Question remains, is Justin Amash going to join any Democrat effort to curtail the president, or is he using this as prelude to something else -- such as his own run for the White House? Drama.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Rooting for Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a Game of Thrones fan, and her favorite character is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, who Warren says, “has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.” We learned this in a column Warren wrote for The Cut published Sunday evening.

In the piece, Warren outlines her reasons for her fandom. Daenerys is fair, she fights for the people, and she wants to end slavery. But in talking about Daenerys, Warren can also, subtly, talk about herself. Like the paragraph below, in which she describes the Dragon Queen—or is she describing herself?

“This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical. Skeptical, because they’ve seen another kind of woman on the Iron Throne: the villain we love to hate, Queen Cersei of Casterly Rock.”

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If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'ld jump the life to come. But [...]